Publications

This report analyses fifteen years of documented settler violence in the Palestinian communities of Masafer Yatta, based on incidents directly witnessed and recorded by Operazione Colomba volunteers between 2010 and 2025. The dataset includes 2.558 cases of harassment, physical aggression, and damage to property or livestock, supported by audiovisual evidence and standardized entries in the project’s “serious log” database.

Harassment is the most frequent form of violence (1691 incidents), occurring on an almost daily basis and significantly restricting Palestinian movement, grazing, and agricultural activity. Additional episodes of physical assault (335) and property destruction (532) demonstrate the material and bodily impacts of this violence. On average, more than 170 incidents are recorded each year, showing that Palestinians in Masafer Yatta live with near-continuous settler presence and threat.

Between 2020 and 2022, when volunteers could not maintain a continuous field presence due to COVID-19 restrictions, incidents were documented indirectly through Palestinian and Israeli human rights defenders and later harmonised into the dataset using Operazione Colomba’s classification standards. The analysis highlights the participation of settler minors, the increasing role of settler-soldiers after October 2023, and the near-total absence of consequences for settlers, even when military or police forces are present.

While geographically specific, the findings provide a clear snapshot of broader dynamics in Area C of the West Bank. Data from 2025 indicates that this violence is not only continuing but consolidating at a higher level: harassment has reached 160 cases (compared to a long-term average of 113), damage to property or animals has risen to 100 cases (from an average of 35), and although recorded physical aggression remains numerically close to its historical average, its severity has increased, including cases of permanent injury and death. The sustained, recurrent, and unpunished violence documented here reflects a wider system of dispossession and territorial expansion that shapes Palestinian daily life and threatens the Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta.**PREMISE**

  

The outbreak of the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, has drawn significant international media and political attention to the Palestinian people. According to data reported the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), updated as of October 22, 2025, since the beginning of the war, Israel has killed at least 68,234 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – Occupied Palestinian Territory [OCHA oPt], 2025). Beyond Gaza, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have also faced significant violence and repression since October 2023. According to _Al Jazeera_, at least 870 Palestinians, including 177 children, have been killed and more than 6.700 wounded in attacks carried out by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers across the West Bank (Al Jazeera, 2025). In addition, Israeli forces have arrested at least 13.500 Palestinians, including 177 children, and demolished more than 2.100 structures, resulting in the displacement of over 6.700 people throughout the occupied territory (ibid).”

Joint assessments by OCHA, WHO, and Palestinian authorities show catastrophic levels of destruction across the Gaza Strip. 78% percent of all structures are destroyed or damaged, alongside 88% of commerce and industry establishments and 77% of the road network (ibid). Health service capacity has been severely compromised: only 8 hospitals in Gaza remain functional, 3 are partially functional, and 22 are non-functional (ibid). Nutrition needs have also reached critical levels. An estimated 132,000 children aged 6–59 months and 55,500 pregnant and breastfeeding women are projected to face acute malnutrition through June 2026, including 41,000 cases of severe child malnutrition (ibid).

The international focus is therefore on what Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, described as genocide in a report for the Human Rights Council (Albanese, 2024). Other equally significant terms have started to be used outside of academic circles to describe the war on Gaza. _Urbicide_ – the deliberate destruction of a city, _domicide_ – the deliberate and systematic destruction of homes, _politicide_ – the silencing of the Palestinian political identity by major political actors, and _ecocide_ – the intentional destruction of the ecosystem and climate of a place. Additionally, the term _scholasticide_ has been used to describe the deliberate targeting and destruction of educational infrastructure, including schools, universities, archives, and the killing of students and educators, with the aim of erasing a people’s intellectual life, knowledge systems, and capacity for future self-determination. The mention of these terms provides various useful frameworks for viewing not only the war in Gaza but also the ongoing colonization in Palestine from 1948 to the present.

While Israel's colonial policy in the Gaza Strip has primarily used tools such as embargoes, technological control, high-intensity wars, and now genocide, what has been described as settler colonialism is taking place in the occupied territories of the West Bank. Historian Ilan Pappé distinguishes between colonialism and settler colonialism based on three main differences. First, settlers rely on an imperial power only at the beginning of the conquest of a territory and soon pursue their own nationalistic aspirations. Second, settler colonialism is not limited to extracting resources from the land – as was the case with the colonial activities of empires – but rather involves the desire to conquer and appropriate the land. Third, within a settler colonial framework, settlers are “refugees of sorts, seeking not just a home but a homeland,” and consequently, the indigenous populations must be displaced and substituted to make way for a national identity that is considered more “original” than that of the natives (Pappé, 2017).

This is where the desire to write this report comes from. Operazione Colomba (Operation Dove) has been present in the West Bank, particularly in the Palestinian communities of the South Hebron Hills – Masafer Yatta, for more than twenty years. In these twenty years, we have documented, experienced, witnessed, and collected data that tell the story of the violent methods by which settlers seize Palestinian land and attempt to displace the local population. The violence perpetrated by the settlers, as we will see, affects not only the Palestinians but involves an entire ecosystem, starting with infrastructure — homes, wells, schools, communities (_domicide_) — as well as crops and water resources (_ecocide_), educational institutions and knowledge systems (_scholasticide_) and the identity of entire communities (_politicide_). This report aims to detail the methods of settler colonialism carried out by Israel in the Palestinian communities of the South Hebron Hills and the repercussions these have on their survival. In outlining the various systems of violence implemented by Israeli settlers, the goal is to accurately document and denounce the colonial policies pursued by Israel in the West Bank.